Verifying the moderating effects of personality factors on the relationship between emotional labour and customer orientation

Abstract

Employees of the service industry often modify and control their emotional expressions to adjust them to what display rules are required for their jobs. The study aims to investigate how surface acting and deep acting of emotional labour influence customer orientation in the service industry, and whether individual personality characteristics perform a significant role as moderating variables. It examines the effect of dependent variables, surface and deep acting, on customer orientation using stratified random sampling at six tourism-related business sectors in South Korea. The main findings of the study are (i) deep acting is a factor that increases customer orientation but surface acting does not decrease it, and (ii) extraversion controls the relationship between surface acting and customer orientation. The results of the study will help with establishing strategies for the improvement of the customer orientation of employees in the tourism and hospitality industries. It is a frontier study of its kind with unique research design applied first in the tourism and hospitality industry.

Keywords:

• Moderating effects
• service providers
• emotional labour
• customer orientation
• personality characteristics